Friday, March 29, 2019

"The attempt to turn every subjectively felt personal issue into a collective cause with a collective action has hatched a brutal form of identity politics that has generated no end to social conflict, with vast carnage along the way."

The 60's slogan has morphed into a profoundly divisive attitude, with the predictable result that

"in practice .. to have as little human contact with others as possible, especially in a business environment. Literally, anyone can be accused and play-it-safe companies would rather toss out the targetted employee rather than risk bad public relations and an unwinnable lawsuit. The toll adds up daily."

How does it all end up?

The demand that we politicize every personal grievance presumes that people only exist as part of groups and those groups must be defined politically and such groupings can be infinitely complex as intersectionality theory demonstrates. One group’s winnings come at the expense of everyone else, and thus does every advance create the conditions for more oppression, disgust, outrage, condemnation, activism, and power grabbing, even as those groups are constantly changing in composition depending on political influence. There is no safety for anyone under this moral code; there is only fear and dread of exposure, and a miserable life overall.

Wednesday, March 27, 2019

The entire climate-prediction edifice as currently promoted, is founded on quicksand, as time-series research at LSE demonstrates - the Hawkmoth Effect rules. The issue comes down to several Inconvenient Modelling Facts:

Complex systems do not generally have the mathematical property of Structural stability. This leads to quite different projections, using the same initial conditions, even if two models differ to a minute degree - the poster at the link graphically illustrates this.

Models used for projections simplify real phyical processes (for tractability) and make assumptions (for tuning) - both of which cause structural inadequacy by incomplete description of the phenomena being modeled.

Turbulent/chaotic systems are pointless to model over long time series if accurate projections are expected: each time-slice depends on the output of the former slice as initial conditions and projections thus rapidly depart from sensible physical-result boundaries as model-time progresses

The real physical world, as best can be gleaned from observation of history, has close-to-absolute boundaries on temperature = +/- 2-3 degrees Centigrade, and two dominant Attractors: Ice Age and InterGlacial. There have been more than enough long-tail (extremely low- probability) perturbations in the past (vulcanism, comet strikes) to supply a record of any vast excursions from these boundaries. The bounds seem to hold, regardless

The 'Escape from Model-land' LSE paper suggests that consistency with the past, use of long-tail (very low probability) inputs and expert judgement as to model applicability and utility in the first place, is the only way out of Model-Land

"The utility and decision-relevance of these model simulations must be judged based on consistency with the past, and out-of-sample predictive performance and expert judgement, never based solely on the plausibility of their underlying principles or on the visual “realism” of outputs."

The two turbulent/chaotic systems which climateers attempt to model are, of course, Atmosphere and Ocean.

Essentially, they are trying to predict the weather on 27 March, 2119, when predicting the weather on 27 April 2019 is clearly a nonsense: a coin-toss or a dartboard are more useful Models. Next weekend's weather - a reasonable prediction is likely. Tomorrow - the prediction will be close to spot-on.

Models are always wrong, but mostly they are Useful.....except for the Far Future. Mathematics rules.

Tuesday, March 26, 2019

"We must strive to provide employment close to where people live” Parfitt (of Auckland Council) says. “Long commutes place a huge, unproductive strain on both people's quality of life and our transport infrastructure."Well, the Plannerz insist on separating all sorts of uses by zonerating to the nth degree. No longer can the shopkeeper live in the flat above the store, the temporary construction crew live in a donga at the latest site, the mechanic trade from a three-bay garage at home, or the budding fashion designer sew and trade from the spare bedroom.Well, at least not legally. In practice, good neighbours, high fences and quiet work habits mean that all this and more activity is happening anyway: people simply can't be arsed dealing with the Clueless Councils and their minionz.Planning which enforces separation of uses causes Commuting. It's as sad and as simple as that. The RMA was designed to handle incompatible uses by examination of Effects. This doesn't need spatial Zoning to be present, but the Town and Country Planning Actorz simply could not conceive of a future without squiggles on maps.So here we sit, locked into spatial use-mandates created by unelected bureaucrats, in our cars, mostly at idle, as we transport ourselves, slowly and expensively, to our Place of Work......

The difference between the Christian and Islamic systems is that the former has had a Reformation, and the latter hasn't. During the course of the schism in Christianity (dating roughly from Luther in 1517 and Henry VIII in 1538 when the Dissolution was ordered) the texts were gradually re-examined over the next couple of centuries, and the Old Testament was largely consigned to the dustbin. Sam Harris (End of Faith) expounds upon this point with his usual enthusiasm.

Islam neither allows any such re-jigging of its texts (that's blasphemy), nor any withdrawal from the Ummah (that's Apostasy). Both have severe penalties. That's why most rational thinkers regard the whole edifice as an oubliette - easy to get down into, impossible to get out of, thus to be avoided.

This then is the main root of the disquiet about things Islamic: it cuts right across Enlightenment values of self-determination, personal freedom within a polity, and rationality. To be sure, as long as adherents stay within the guardrails set by the wider non-Islamic society, no issues. But unfortunately for that happy prospect, there's the uncomfortable fact that the Islamic texts regard that wider society as infidels, to be converted if possible.

We've largely abandoned Christian evangelism because of its long history of abuses, mis-steps and ultimate futility. So we are not about to embrace a newer, evangelistic, and intensely patriarchic imperialism......

Wednesday, October 24, 2018

Two articles, both by Angelo M. Codevilla, both in a distinctly elegiac tone regarding the fate of the USA. His core theory is that a revolutionary threshhold has been crossed, and that what happens next is uncertain in the extreme. The links are in date order, and need to be read in sequence in order to make much sense.

Wednesday, September 19, 2018

The zero fees model (I was there at the inception) depended on the original bums-on-seats EFTS funding: mo' Bums, Mo' Munny. It's easy to see that, with the injection of an initial capital sum to enable the show to get through the first year or three, the EFTS funding would let it wash its face thereafter provided sufficient bums - er - students - were garnered. The funding came from the community (Mayor Tim had a hand in that), the students came - good advertising, tight cost control and well-delivered courses, and the rest is history. The students, needless to say, came at the expense of competing institutions. And the Auckland branch? It's the same reason as banks used to get robbed - it;s where the Munny (students, carting student per-EFTS funding like little dollar balloons over their heads) is/are.

Of course, it was a classic first-mover-advantage - er - Move. It could not easily be replicated, not least because there were no other tightly knit communities like Southland, prepared to stump up the millions needed to get over that initial hill.

But that explains the Auckland branch.

Oh, and the Management. Well, SIT never got itself embroiled in the wilder reaches of Credential Mania. Unlike, say, Aoraki, which at one point had a Diploma in Aromatherapy on the course list....... never lasted (the course or the institution).....pity the suckers students who Believed....and then Enrolled. Because if yer didn't, ye'd be Larfing yer head off....

Thursday, August 16, 2018

PM: Granters, I've just come back from talking to those Teachers. Can't we shake that Money Tree you have, and give them a few raises? I mean, who's gonna edumicate little Neve if the teachers cannot afford houses in Auckland? And I'm sure as heck not gonna Buy in Wellers....

FM: Jace, Jace, Jace. I'm none too sure it was a brilliant move to munge your schedule and go talk to them in the first place. Neve, teaching, you've been reading those Signs, haven't you. You know a good chunk of them were painted by Children at Art period - I've already had Ian LG chewing my ear about Child Labour. And as for schoolkids being paraded about the streets with signs - I know it is supported by a few Parents but the optics - oh, dear, it really does seem like Child Abuse...You of all people have gotta parrot the Party Line - we cannot fix Nine Long Years of Neglect in a single term oops I mean year. And I've just had to spend a quarter of a billion on more freakin' Trees, to keep He Who Must Not Be Named away from our throats (golly, that man makes me Quake).

PM: But Granty-poo, if there's that much in kitty that we can shell out scads of it out to Vol - I mean, you know who - then everyone in the queue - Teachers, Tertiary, Police, Defence, and I'm told MBIE and IRD although I must confess not to have noticed - they went Out too, or something? - where was I, oh yes, everyone in the queue, which seems to be growing daily, can See the dosh getting spread around and I sense that they are getting that FOMO thing - they are worried that the cupboard might be bare soon, and so they wanna get in Now, and with Big Percentages. Oh, Grant, what are we gonna do?

FM: Well, we have got the Cullen Tax Grab - I mean, the TWG - working away in the background, and perhaps we could advance the pace a little there. Don't let this get outside the room, but the TWG is basically a Rich Prick's Squeeze, and all he, I mean They - haveta do is to get the definition of the RP's down low enough that we'll have a few more tens of billions. Let me have a quiet word. But please, for Financial Prudence' sake, don't go addressing howling mobs of tax-funded employees. That's what Unions are for....

Sunday, June 17, 2018

Contra to Jason's article wherein a weary acceptance of MMP is argued for, it needs to be recalled that Godzone has no Constitution (unlike the US and Britain), no Upper House to allow measured reflection on legislation, and a tendency (shown all too clearly in the case of the Taranaki Hari-kiri re Oil/Gas) to sweeping, precipitate and (so it seems) completely reflexive action. This is to be sure, occasional. But it is nonetheless extremely unsettling, especially for the targeted groups. This sort of action is fairly much what is behind the continued slide in business confidence: the question that all think but few say out loud is simply 'what will these clowns do next?'.

It can fairly be advanced that the sort of populism we see now in NZ is an attempt to substitute State action of one sort or another for a fractured sense of national culture and the sacred. Feelz, the faith-based Green initiatives, the raw narcissim of the Winstone Ganders of our Parliament, the inchoate visions of Maori resurgence, the general retreat into solipsism have become the standard fare, and a thin gruel it is.

The results: a plethora of mindless acts (especially by youth, who feel all this anomie most intensely), suicides and self-harm, a deep series of fractures and the start of the demonisations we though were behind us - boomers vs Millenials, rural vs urban, Greens vs our present level of comfort, renters vs landlords, Awkland vs the rest of the country, cities vs provinces, makers vs takers, vegans vs omnivores, and on and on ad infinitum. There is nothing here to unite us if these chasms widen. And attempts by Gubmints to rub Statist balm, using our own extorted money, into these essentially spiritual communal wounds, miss the mark so completely as to be farcical.

These all are manifestations of what is commonly called the identity crisis of the West, but might better be termed the West’s struggle with the sacred. By “sacred”, I mean that which endures beyond our lifetime and beyond the lifetime of our children, the enduring characteristics that make us unique and will continue to distinguish us from the other peoples of the world, and which cannot be violated without destroying our sense of who we are. The sacred is what a country’s soldiers are willing to die to protect; unless there is something for which we are willing to die, we will find nothing for which we are willing to live.
Tradition surely is part of this, but not every part of our tradition is sacred to us: we find within tradition elements that have prevailed through the ages and which we expect to prevail, if our present existence is to have a purpose, beyond our lifetimes. These elements of tradition cannot exist except through a nation: contrary to Hillary Clinton, it takes not a village but a nation to embody the language, customs and ethos that found our identity. The invariant feature of the various expressions of nationalism on both sides of the Atlantic is an attempt to recapture the past in order to envision a future. “Identity” as a concept is meaningless, except as it is rooted in the past and pointed toward the future. Who we are at the moment depends on where we came from and where we expect to go. Our present, as Augustine argued in Confessions XI, is a composite of memory and anticipation.
Augustine (in City of God XXIV) famously took issue with Cicero’s definition of a res publica as an association founded on common interest, arguing instead that it was founded on a common love. It might be more accurate to say that it is founded on a common sense of the sacred, for the sacred embodies not only love but also awe and fear, specifically the fear that by violating the elements of tradition that define us we will lose ourselves.

"..by violating the elements of tradition that define us we will lose ourselves" - but what, any more, Defines Us in the here and now?

Politicians, whatever their personal characteristics, do reflect something of the zeitgeist. And it is not a pretty image that we see in that dim mirror. After all, just ponder the various comment threads here on Interest, for confirmation......

Tuesday, May 29, 2018

Michael Reddell has a good point to make, although the phrase 'gifting' could also be applied to beneficiaries, pensioners, Waiheke ferry off-peak users and other non-productive attachments to the ever-generous Gubmint Munny Teat.

Despite announcing yesterday a plan that aims to eradicate mycoplasma bovis from New Zealand, there was no sign of the pro-active release of any background papers or analysis. We don’t have copies of the relevant Cabinet papers, or the relevant advice from The Treasury or MPI. Not that long ago, the incoming government talked of its commitment to open government, and now it plans to spend hundreds of millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money – without, it appears, any additional legislation – without giving us, up front, any of the relevant papers.

One of the more obvious consequences of the cull is that real, productive units - 400KgMS per unit per season - are being turned into burgers and pet food with a much lower unit price. This is like replacing factories with coffee shacks, although, come to think about it, That's already happened: the foundry and machine shop I worked at in Invergiggle as holiday employment for a mechanical engineering degree (unfinished, y'all are quite safe) is now a bowling alley.

Another consequence is that, while entire farm herds are being culled and earnings fall, the debt load does not. Cue Boomer's Story.

We worked through Spring and Winter,through Summer and through FallBut the mortgage worked the hardest and the steadiest of us allIt worked on nights and Sundays,it worked each holidayIt settled down among us and it never went away

So lenders will be anxiousiy poring through their dairy client's contracts, and trying to estimate what effect the cull will have on everything from provisions for defaults, to downstream effects on contractors, equipment sales and repair outfits (dependent on financing for sales) and the wider rural communities. For a marked-to-market loan on (say) a typical dairy farm in MPI's cross-hairs, this has gotta be a substantial write-down. Enough of these on the loans ledger, and the banks themselves are vulnerable to a credit downgrade. And we can guess what that will do to both the cost and availability of credit for - well, almost anything, as DC notes in the article.

The final (and there are more, as common taters may care to append) aspect is that there will be reduced economic activity as between farms: transport, sales, calf-rearing, the casual neighbourly offer of excess milk to next-door's calves, the annual Calf Day at rural schools, breeding herds, and the list can be extended far and wide. Reduced activity means less transactions, less tax, more calls on benefits and other support schemes, and everyone entering hunker-down-and-sit-it-out mode. This could easily last 3-5 years.

So Michael R's question about the basis upon which this whole scheme has been entered into, by the Good Intentions Paving Company (2017) limited, is a very valid one. Transparency is sorely needed, not hand-waving.

Wednesday, May 23, 2018

The issue with Gubmint large-scale anything which has to be built physically (as opposed to redistributed with a hefty ticket-clip) is that the entire public service has not Clue One about the Time Value of Munny.

Propose a project for $100m in Year 1, with an initial cost outlay (say, for Land) of $30m, Years 2-4 at $20m each nominal, and Year 5 at $10m, a WACC of 6%, a construction cost inflation rate of 9%, and a five-year schedule. The Guibmint wallahs then gape in wonderment as the thing (without contract variations) ends up costing $143.7m. Cumulative interest carry is $20.4m, construction inflated by CCI (which to be kind is limited to years 2-5 only) is $23.3m. So 100+ 20.4 + 23.3 = 143.7. The time value of munny....

This sort of non-thinking is absolutely rife through all levels of government. They never have to sell enough on Friday to make payroll on Wednesday following, never have to chase debts, never have to juggle cash flows to make the 20th of the month payments to creditors. Their world is literally cossetted: salaries arrive with the regularity of a sunrise, revenue falls into their ledgers like Sky Food off the edge of the bench for a dog, cash-flow is non-existent, and the only exception to this happy existence is IRD, who certainly know the Time Value on unpaid taxes....

Imagine, (strike up the John Lennon chorus about now) that Local Gubmint had to pay consent applicants the IRD UOMI rate on project value for every day they dragged the chain on the consent. Imagine... but enough already. T'will nevah happen.

Friday, January 05, 2018

.. a lot of people financially lost businesses as business interruptions claims often are not successful.

Therein lies a tale.
Folks who are Shocked, Shocked (Captain Renault?) about the state of the Old CBD are missing the local knowledge and the history of the quake sequences. A by no means complete list:

Businesses were locked out of the Old CBD for months, and as Speckles quite rightly notes, this led, quelle surprise, to a chain of failures as owners were unable to retrieve inventory, records, plant or equipment. It would have been possible to 'mine into' dodgy buildings to do this, had authorities been less stupid, and some smart guys immediately signed themselves onto demolition crews with precisely that retrieval in mind. But most owners did or could not.

It's hard enough to build and lease a single building on a modest plot. Trying to do that on massive floor plates on huge land areas is nigh-on impossible.

It took so long to aggregate titles to produce the Precincts that some - Health, Innovation - just went elsewhere. Health is now centred around Bealey Ave, Innovation is a fizzer, and the only successful Precinct in its original conception is Justice, which of course is funded by the person you can spot in any mirror.

Ground conditions are patchy but uniformly shocking. Justice building cost Fletchers a cool $100 milly in over-runs, and the engineering plus remediation required for foundations alone is so expensive just to get a stable platform, that rents, always subject to ECON101, have to be way higher than suburban or other centre averages, to afford to start digging.

Other TLA's have proven themselves far more adept at soaking up the residential and commercial munny that flowed from insurance coffers. IZone at Rolleston (Selwyn DC), a plethora of residential subdivisions in outlying but perfectly commutable areas, and the business opportunities that come with greenfield development, have, quite simply, eaten Christchurch City's lunch.

The immediate answer for businesses that wished to survive was to relocate. This coincided with a wave of land developments due not to quakes but to reconsideration of space requirements (e.g. Riccarton Raceway). This provided business parks and high-end plots, all outside the Old CBD. None of the new office tenants is in any hurry to relocate back into the Old CBD, because most have found that the 'doughnut city' - a ring of businesses around the Old CBD - actually suits themselves, their customers, and their staff extremely well. So the Old CBD is gonna struggle to attract anything but hospo, high-end retail, and consultancies firmly attached to the Gubmint Teat.

The earthquake sequence was handled so badly in business survival terms by authorities that there is considerable animus out there, about exposing businesses again to either the Old CBD, the City Council, or in general, to any development which appears to have the cold dead hands of Gubmint anywhere near it. This animus will take a generation to diffuse.

Thursday, December 14, 2017

Unfunded or uncertain or pure Exclusions - listed without comment.....Page numbers are from the HYEFU.

New TV station P71

Conservation funding not included P71

Customs upgrades P72

America's Cup P72

Tertiary Ed P73

"The behavioural assumptions, and therefore the impact on future costs are unquantifiable at this early stage but there is an expected general increase in demand for tertiary education beyond the forecast period"

ECE Funding Review P73

School of Rural Medicine P73

Hosting APEC 2021 P73

Development Assistance P73/4

Public Housing P75

Refugees Quota P75

Justice Commitments (Access) P76

LINZ LandOnLine P76

Welfare P77

"The behaviour change associated with such changes, including the removal of section 70A of the Social Security Act 1964 (which reduces the amount of benefit payments owed to sole parents who do not disclose the identity of the other parents of their children) is unknown."

National Land Transport Fund P78

"Crown funding may need to be provided for projects if they do not receive NLTF funding and the scope, timing and costs of some of these projects are still being finalised."

Auckland Transport Alignment Plan P78

"...[Gap] is between $5 billion and $6.5 billion. The Government and Auckland Council are currently considering how to refresh ATAP in order to align the priorities of the new Government with the existing priorities of Auckland Council. This work will also include consideration of options to address the funding gap."

Investing in Children Transformation P79

" To the extent that the costs associated with the new Ministry cannot be funded from a tagged contingency or from reprioritisation, additional funding is likely to be required."

Clothing Allowances P79

"[Act] comes into force on 1 July 2018. The fiscal implications of this Act have yet to be fully assessed and incorporated in the fiscal forecasts"

Learning Support P80

"..[If building cost] pressures cannot be managed within agency baselines, additional funding is likely to be required."

Southern Response Earthquake Services Support P81

"The ultimate cost to the Crown of settling earthquake claims remains subject to significant uncertainty"

Primary Care Services P81

"The implementation details and funding arrangements for these commitments are yet to be finalised."

Transitional Housing P82

"The average cost of providing transitional housing support services is significantly higher than funding appropriated in Budget 2017...Additional capital is required to meet the existing supply target of 2,155 places, which might require adjusting upwards."

Addressing the Gender Pay Gap in the State Sector P84

" Fulfilling this commitment may involve costs to the Crown."

Changes to Institutional Form of Government Agencies P84

" commitments are likely to involve a number of changes to the composition and structure of existing government departments. Where the additional resourcing (and other costs of these changes) cannot be met through baseline expenditure, further Crown funding may be required."

Increasing the Minimum Wage P85

".. increased costs to State sector employers. Funding may be sought where costs cannot be absorbed within baselines without resulting in unacceptable impacts on service delivery. "

Pay Equity Claims following the Care and Support Worker Settlement P85

"The resolution of such claims within State-employed and State-funded sectors may involve significant costs to the Crown."

Variance in Costs of 100-Day Plan Commitments P86

" forecasts include funding for the Government’s 100-Day Plan commitments, including First Year Fees-free Tertiary Education and the Families’ Package. Where costs are different to what has been reflected in the forecasts, the resulting fiscal impacts will need to be managed."

This is Treasury CYA - gently pointing out that this is not a full Budget and that there are considerable...Lacunae, no, Gaps, no, Omissions - oh, let's just settle for HOLES!

Tuesday, December 05, 2017

As a former CFO (although we had no such lofty titles in them days) of a major Polytech, I saw the effects of dragging entire cohorts of unprepared entrants into the system, and the effects of undirected (bums-on-seats) funding at first hand, because I had to corral Budgets for the hot mess:

Foundation courses to get the worst cases literate, adequately numerate, and able to comprehend English. Pure overhead as little to no funding was directly available until well along in the piece.

The start of a proliferation of 'soft' courses designed expressly to mop up EFTS-based funding by getting Mo' Bums.

The realisation, very late in the piece, and I was out of it by then, that by seriously limiting Class Materials expenses and Teaching Hours, certain courses generated massive internal subsidies for Other Stuff. Because the EFTS funding took no account of Costs, only Bums, and was generous to a fault.

Students from privileged backgrounds who constantly applied for Hardship Grants despite rocking up in cars, expensive mountain bikes, or motorbikes. I did make some of them cry (sat on the Approving or in these cases Disapproving Committee). But a nice little rort.

It took a decade or two before the EFTS funding model (it came in in 1989/90 IIRC) started to distinguish Costly versus Costless courses. It was brought into sharp relief when one Polytech which shall remain nameless, dished out a CD to the students. That was the entire course cost....but the EFTS fundling even on the lower scales was only a little south of $10K per Bum.

Then Degree courses started to come in (why? because the EFTS funding per Degreed Bum was much higher), so we saw Degrees in Naturopathy and Diplomas in AromaTherapy start to proliferate to take advantage. That did not last long because they were so Luminously Bonkers. But the issue was that they could Start in the first place.

The race for funding also pitted institutions against each other, as they vied for the same student base, and duplicated, often badly, courses run better elsewhere.

The Good Times effectively came to an end with EFTS limits per study category, directed funding for certain institutions, and incentives about Cooperation to cut out the hideous duplication and waste that was apparent. The result was TEC, which now (I understand, far away from the game now) exerts an Iron Fist over who offers What, to Whom, and at what Cost.

But I bet TEC won't have much of a Xmas Break. Because our idealistic crew, shopping for the Youf Vote as always, has perhaps taken us right back to the Old Schemozzle. I'd put a bob each way on the fact that many of the New Starry-eyed Entrants to Tertiary as a result of the massive incentives now offered, will need just as much Pastoral Care to get them Fit to Teach, as PT's Housing tenants are gonna get to sort their appalling lifestyle choices.

Monday, November 27, 2017

This post was prompted by a plaintive cry of vehicles which are
"manufactured almost entirely without human input, sold online with no human input, and ultimately driven without human input. They would seldom crash, and need virtually zero maintenance." The implication is that Workers disappear and with them their Incomes and with that, their Taxes....

Lets chase the BOM down on each of these.

Manufacturing is the end product - metal-bashing and assembly of a plethora of components, every one of which has been: Designed, Prototyped, Materials Mined, Transported, Refined, Shipped, Cast, Moulded, Machined, Painted, Warehoused, Sold, Financed, Transported again, all before getting to the TSLA factories. Every single one of those activities has their own BOM, into which humans are an essential input. Who else Brands, creates a compelling website, decides on Finance, writes up the Contracts, Programs the CNC tools, Builds the manufactories, and passes the bills for payment. I've been involved in automating finance-related jobs out of existence for forty years, and quelle surprise, there is still wetware at the root of most of finance activities.

'Online' is the visible result of literally person-centuries of clever coding, marketing ideas and entrepreneurial individuals (Jack Ma...). It's wetware all the way down for the Ideas. As to the 'automation' possible, well, Compilers, which take away the burden of writing in binary, have been around since the 1950's, yet, quelle surprise, IT in general is part of the STEM explosion in careers.

'Driven with no human input' is an aspiration, not a fact. Caterpillar has had self-driving mine trucks for three decades, yet wetware is still employed to spot them for loading, and to dump them at the top of the haul road. And self-driving in winter ice, snow, fog and other very common North American road conditions is certainly gonna create work for panel-beaters: because ABS, vehicle dynamics adjustments and environment detection are useless in such conditions, as many tourists discover up our NZ ski access tracks....

Last I checked, TSLA vehicles have Tyres, Suspension, and other moving parts which wear. So zero maintenance is another myth. There may well be less mechanics. But then where are the buggy-whip makers and wagon wheelwrights of yesteryear? 80% of employment in developed countries 150 years ago was agricultural. Now 2% is. What happened? Yes, too many barista and aromatherapista.....

In short, we need not worry about Workers and their Income just yet. Heck, even Bicycles need Mines, Refineries, Ships, and Tyres to supply their very simple BOM's. Mines need Miners and before that Stone-gazers who can look at an outcrop and say ' yup, there's Cu, Fe, Sn or Pb in that there Rock'. I'll stop now but y'all get the drift....(mining pun right there)

Sunday, November 26, 2017

Awkland Architects will have a perfect insider's view as all of this unfolds.

I think (despite my VRWC tendencies) that the whole Awkland Affordable Hoosing schemozzle probably cannot be even partially fixed any other way than by Gubmint intervention. But to take up a couple of points from elsewhere in the thread:

Philippa Howden-Chapman, Professor of Public Health at Otago University. She has led groundbreaking research on the health impacts of cold, damp housing, and

Alan Johnson, Senior Policy Analyst for the Salvation Army and author of The Salvation Army's State of the Nation report, which highlights effects of the housing crisis

This group is anything but Expert. An economist, a Sallie SJW, and an academic are hardly a Brains Trust, particularly as the conundrums of fast, abundant, affordable housing will include the two most thorny issues of all: land costs and automated building methods. One would have expected some Builders, Engineers, Manufacturers and Overseas folks in the group. But hey, the old Labour/Greens mantra reasserts itself: 'We Know Best'.

The other salient point is about the inherent risk involved in socialising all the moving parts of the solution. In Christchurch, f'rinstance, no construction company with any economic sense will put its hand up for the now-foobarred Metro Sports Facility, because the Gubmint has just tossed the head contractor (Leighs-Cockram) under the bus. I foresee something quite similar to this caution in the Hoosing Debacle: with such a swirling mess of Regulation, Land issues, Construction Methods and attendant risks, what CEO is gonna say to the troops - 'hey, this looks juicy, lets spend a coupla mill and get in on the action' ??

I think we all are gonna need a Contract with Popcorn suppliers, to sit comfortably on the sidelines and watch the Great Game unfold. And as Popcorn may well be GST-Free soon (being an Essential Food), perhaps a Popcorn Futures Contract of some sort to minimise tax......

Friday, November 24, 2017

While the Rate of GST is excluded from the ToR, Exemptions from it are evidently not. And from the loose lips of several pollies over recent days, you, dear reader, should be aware of the following candidates for Exemptions:

With corresponding claw-back through (say it quietly) cartelised price adjustments to end consumers

With greatly increased scope for mis-description of goods ('Liquor', in the bad old days, was frequently sold as 'Drench' out in the back-blocks). So what's to stop yer local Baked Potato outlet selling you a $4 Raw Tater, which you promptly hand back to them for a 10c Filling and Heating fee?

The economic effects such as the squeeze-outs of smaller businesses in favour of franchises, big-box and corporate retailers: imagine trying to decide which of These food retailers you are.

Once a first step onto this slippery slide is taken, the basis of our current GST - free of exemptions for the most part, single or zero rate for the most part - is foobarred.

The exemptions list, being essentially political in the first place, is of course then open to pressure from identity groups for their favoured set of products. And all of them will have a justification, and some apparently sound reasons for arguing their cases. And all of them can Vote......

Which will, in short order, turn the Exemptions List into an essentially pork-barrel politics exercise. The result will be a fatal and probably irrevocable infection of a hitherto internationally recognised best-practise ad valorem tax system.

We probably have a Gubmint whose idealism, fearlessness and energy could induce them to take that first step.

I'd suggest bringing Popcorn, but am unsure as to the amount of GST it will attract in future......

Wednesday, November 15, 2017

TLA's are greedy, but cunning with it. The steps to TLA budgets (I've coded the rules and relationships into a very few of the cubes that most TLA's rely on for quickly estimating the consequences of various settings) run like this:

Gather all the blue-sky budgets from every nook and cranny of the whole show and bung 'em into the hopper

The 'Rates Required' parent object gives the first, horrendous result. As does 'Capex Required' which feeds back into 'Rates Required' via depreciation, and also (of course) feeds 'Cashflow', and 'Financing Required'. Everyone promptly utters a few well-chosen but un-minuted Anglo-Saxon words, and the real work begins

Firstly, a general paring of obviously stupidly inflated budgets and admonishments to their managers (but Promotions for the most egregious....)

Secondly, a concerted effort to move the less obvious budgets into areas that can have 'Revenue from Modest Fees' (and thus, entirely coincidentally, subtract from 'Rates Required')

Trim 'Capex' (which trims 'Depreciation' and hence 'Rates Required') OR (and more subtly) move it sideways into - ya guessed it - Activities with Fees Income

Take another look at 'Rates Required' and see if it passes the obvious Smell Test - will Councillors pass this?

Take a cursory look at the Fee-generating activities (where most of the sideways dumping has occurred) and see if They look acceptable (or are levied on such odious categories of subject that no-one cares - landlords, large businesses, car salespersons, hoteliers).

It's highly likely at this point that 'Rates Required' is still way beyond the pale, so Phase 2 commences - alter the incidence of Rates via uniform charges, separate rates, more Modest Fees and so on.

So 'Rates Required' is now fed by a plethora of Rates, Charges, Special Rates, Fees Income, and Differential rates. Note that the total has not altered - that is too obvious to mention at this point - the main effort is to disguise it as competently as possible

The final check - are all the now-diffused sources of 'Rates Required', 'Fees and Charges' etc - sufficiently opaque as to survive public scrutiny? If Yes, carry on and levy 'em, else go back two clicks and obfuscate some more

One should never watch Laws, Sausages and Rates being made, to extend a very ancient saying....it could shake one's faith in Human Nature....

Wednesday, October 25, 2017

Extension of ETS in some form or another to agriculture will test the production quantity versus production mix equation

Industry-wide wage bargaining will test the definition of 'industry' and will provide a field day for re-describers of various stripes

SME's will boom but as sole traders/franchisees/mom-and-pop outfits, because the disincentives for employing staff are far too great - a good test of #1

Big increase in regional construction and fit-out as regionalisation takes off - but the real test will be of productivity (the local example is the Christchurch re-build, now petering out)

Minimum wage rises are a classic universal pricing signal for sectors highly exposed to labour costs, without attracting anti-trust/cartel accusations, so expect a raft of 'em

A billion trees sounds marvellous, but to get 'em planted in deserving areas (e.g. north and west of Gisborne) means long days in hot sun, on 45 degree slopes, living in work camps and plonking in 100 trees/day. There would have to be 4550 such plonkers, working 220 days each year, to achieve the 100m trees per annum. Compulsory (because how else ya gonna get them trees planted? Nicely configured ads on Seek?) tree-plonking, attractive, much? Oh, and the cost? 4550*8*220*20 = $160m and change per annum...just for the warm bodies. Add supervisors, transport, packed lunches, Elfin Safety and whatnot, and it well be well north of $200m.

Thursday, September 21, 2017

The need for a 10-year build guarantee (IIRC) by the prefabber, with associated insurance and backstopping costs

BRANZ attitude to any new materials certification - many tests, several years, mucho pesos

The existing Materials Cartel protection of 'their' patch - they can reasonably be assumed to throw various rocks on That path

The limited number of actual Jobs (especially unionised), as factories tend to be highly automated and work around the clock - won't appeal to the blue-collars seeking work in 'em - or their puppet-masters

And the land prices underneath are still foobarred by the brown-cardy set via Plans which limit supply, inject Time and thus Cost to development, and which change at glacial speed.

Just imagine the reaction of the current playaz to an announcement like This (thought experiment alert!)

"We are prefabricating a Hoosing Factory offshore. It will be highly automated, needing only a few top-flight technicians to keep it running. It will arrive onshore in October and will commence operations in December. The houses produced from this factory:

will use materials proven overseas but new to NZ,

will be manufactured to sub-millimetre tolerances,

will be built under cover,

will be assembled in 2-3 days on site by an experienced crew using battery-operated tools.

The factory is expected to have a throughput of 20 houses per day, and will operate 20 hours per day for 360 days of the year.

Maintenance crews will be flown in for a 5-day upgrade and maintenance window.

Unit costs for the houses thus produced are expected to be in the region of $800/square.

All houses will be serial-numbered and will come with a 20-year guarantee of weathertightness."

Wednesday, September 20, 2017

Wishful thinking - it's never been a free market: Let us count some of the ways it Ain't a market:

Dopey zoneration policies by economically clueless TLA's which serve to foobar the price of the land under them Hooses

A cosy Building Materials Duopoly, untrammelled by ComCom, hostile to new entrants and highly protective of their own cartelised patches

Consents, and other regulation, subject to local brown-cardy-staffed monopolies which have yet to recognise that Time = Money so have complete freedom to inject Time and Modest Fees into every activity under their baleful purview

A building industry composed of thousands of two-bit builders, clonking up houses in a manner which would not be unfamiliar to a 19th century carpenter, all vying for the same few high-end-of-market jobs, because that's where the munny is, leading to highly inelastic supply at t'other end

A regional price floor slipped in under all house prices by economically clueless Gubmint schemes like Welcome Home Loans (criterion - can you Fog a Mirror?) which ensures house prices - new or old - are sticky on the downside

No doubt, common taters can think of more ways it ain't a real 'market'.....so 'it's own devices' has, shall we say, a very particular meaning.

It means, being left in the gentle claws of the Opolists, rent-seekers and ticket-clippers.

Monday, September 18, 2017

The sad fact is that NZ, as a long, thin, and increasingly poor country, is just chocka with what John Robb terms 'systempunkts' - points where a directed attack or natural causes can generate an effect wildly out of proportion to the original investment.

Kaikoura earthquake severed the single rail line North-South in the Mainland,

Xtra's Interwebs in the NI went west a few years back via a rat on a fiber optic on one loop, and a digger (them diggers should, perhaps, be Watched?) on the other

I've always reckoned that a handful of clapped-out Datsun 180's, 'stalled' on a few strategic Awkland on or off-ramps or the Newmarket overbridge, would gridlock the sorry show for a day or more

And let's not forget the weeks without power to Central Awkland a coupla decades back.

A leetle story about older infrastructure in a major Wellywood Gubmint building just before Y2K (remember that?):

The crew decided to test the resilience of the backup power systems in the building. Good call, because over three attempts, this is what they found each time they disconnected the external power via the Big Red Switch:

The UPS behind the mainframe floor had never been deep-cycled. It failed after a few tens of seconds. New UPS ordered.

Weeks later, feeling a bit smug, next disconnection. UPS works, genny fires up. Genny lasts about half an hour before one phase burns out completely. Turns out the building, as it was occupied, had all power wired to predominantly one of three possible phases. Mild panic sets in. Building wiring hastily re-jigged, New genny ordered

Genny arrives. Whoops, won't fit in the basement space. Needs a hastily erected external shed. Panic turns from mild to extreme (mid-December 1999). But third time lucky, it all holds together when the Big Red Switch is thrown.

- the SC for dig-outs blows an excavator hose and contracts a hydraulic hose repairer to come on site and replace it.

- four of the five SC's have diesel delivered to machines on site, by 4 different small-volume diesel retailers

- the sealing contractor sub-contracts a bitumen supplier to supply the hot-mix

- the kerbing contractor sub-contracts a concrete pre-mix supplier to deliver concrete into the kerbing machine

So does the LW apply to:

- the HC (they employ only 2 people to supervise this job, yet have a staff of 100) - LW 2, 100 or something in between?

- each of the five SC's (same distribution - 2-4 people on site for this job, 20-50 off site, employed by those SC's, on other work)?

- the hydraulic hose repairer (a contractor to one of the SC's)?

- the four diesel suppliers (contractors to each of the SC's)?

- the bitumen supplier's staff?

- the concrete pre-mix supplier's staff?

The example could be expanded almost infinitely (the lunch contractor to the SC's? the food suppliers to the lunch contractor? The processor. packer, transporter, grower of those foods? The truck maintenance firm for the concrete premix supplier?)

It's the most impractical suggestion one could possibly conceive.....

The LW proposal, applied to indirect staff, runs headlong into the bill-of-materials-explosion issue. An illustration:

The policy: every contractor to a LW-signed-up organisation must pay LW to staff. Sounds simple, right?

- LW organisation hires a contractor (the head contractor, HC) to extend a car-park.

Monday, August 07, 2017

David Hargreaves writes: If you can't make builders put a spade in the ground, and the bankers give them the money, it ain't going to work

Darn tootin' right.

It looks to me like some sorta Compulsion is gonna be needed to get anything moving, because the current modus operandi won't, and for perfectly clear reasons:

The Planning is local, and incompetent at that, but the economic drivers - immigration, banking, building standards, materials costs are all central, not to say Cartelised

The building industry would be quite familiar to someone from the 19th century, plonked onto a building site. A couple of days to come up to speed with nailguns, glues, portable power tools and materials, and they'd be clonking frames together in the rain along with the best of 'em

The price of land screws up everything on top, so that';s why it's only worth building large footprints, and for the upper quartile of the market

TLA's, desperate for non-Rates revenue streams, charge for everything they possibly can and, like the financiers, are adept at inventing ever longer chains of tickets to clip. And as a local monopoly, fat chance of getting any competitive behaviours to sort That out.

So the way forward will have to involve some combination of the following:

Remove TLA's incompetent hands from the Planning Tiller by simply nullifying all local Plans, and letting the effects-based RMA handle the lot

Remove BRANZ etc control and simply adopt whatever international standards seem appropriate for materials. We don't use BRANZ to certify materials for boats, caravans or planes, Why do they need to be in the loop for Houses?

Hosuing factories - lotsa them. Everything CNC, fitted out in QC conditions, under cover. Litmus test: that 19th-century builder should be totally, utterly lost on the factory floor.

Land, of course. So compulsorily acquire everu scrap of greenish land wherever thought appropriate, use Kiwisaver investors to finance it as there will be a return as it's developed and sold, and develop/sell it using the usual PPP approach. But, and importantly, the CG thus invented has to stay largely in the public side (KS returns, Gubmint's General Account) and applied largely to the replacement aspects noted above - getting factories, standards, etc up and humming, and a bit of trust-busting amongst the Cartels.

A thought experiment, of course - the safest kind....but at least it is Relentlessly Positive (unless yer a Planner).

Thursday, July 27, 2017

The common taters who itch to Fiddle with GST need a reality check. Changing the overall rate is something of a mission, but do-able: the change from 12.5 to 15% shows that.

But the core feature of GST is that it has, effectively, only two rates: zero (for financial services and the like) or 15% for everything else.

[Yes, before y'all point to them, there are tiny exceptions, like the reduced rate for long-stay residential care in managed village facilities, but these are well able to be coped with where encountered because those organisations are typically single-purpose anyway].

The moment GST becomes differential for any reason, in any widespread sense (e.g. for food versus petrol) the complications start rolling, as do the domino effects:

Every business exposed to mixed sales which cross the new GST application boundaries, have instant compliance costs. Sales have to be differentiated, GST returns become much more complex (because the possibility of getting it wrong multiplies, and IRD takes a dim view of errors). These costs translate into smaller profits, which lead to price increase pressures, business withdrawal or downsizing, and other direct costs.

Differential GST requires exquisite, certain Description of every possible good or service to which a given rate applies. Supermarkets typically run 20-40K SKU's, and each and every one must be Described accurately and the correct tax rate applied. Maintenance alone is a big overhead, and the effect on typical sales techniques such as 'discount bundles' - buy three 2-litre milks, get 1 free and get a half-price pair of gardening gloves - can be easily imagined. How should this be taxed, because the weighting of the sales is uncertain.

The BOM-explosion issue arises very quickly. I buy Flour, Salt, Yeast and Butter. Are they 'Food'? Not individually but together, they make Bread. How to tax them? Go one step further back. Pepper, bay leaves, cinnamon. Food? Less certain. But a hot-pot meal would be bereft without them. Go a further step back in the BOM. Pepper grinder, pestle and mortar. Food? No, but try making that hot-pot without them. And they cannot be used for much else. Such boundary issues destroy the Certainty which is the hallmark of a good tax system.

The central administration needed to maintain the endless lists of goods, disseminate it and keep up with the constant flow of new product (whoever heard of quinoa a few years back?) is non-trivial. This is pure economic deadweight: it is substantial extra activity in a non-tradeable.

Once differentiation has commenced, the political arguments about stuffing up a nice simple tax, go out the window. The technical term is Defenestration. So every new Bright Idea has a much better chance of being incorporated (because 'It's Good for the Children/Environment/Winnie/our little business segment/our Region/our political cronies/the unions/beneficiaries/the Grey Vote...it's an infinite list). Do y'all really wanna open That up for grabs? It's a direct path to cronyism and to a tax guide the size of several phone books, updated quarterly, available for purchase for a Modest Fee.

There are two aphorisms worth recording about Tax in general.- it's like plucking a goose. You want the most Feathers with the least Hissing.- a high degree of Inequity is preferable to a small degree of Uncertainty.

The short version: don't foobar GST by opening the Pandora's Box of differential rates.....

Sunday, June 25, 2017

So, so many common taters are expecting More of the Same when it comes to building techniques. Armies of self-employed tradies required, hopefully with apprentices tethered to their belts, same old clonking frames together out in the always-tropical Awkland weather. Four sub-classes of LBP needed for a simple build (unless you're a Carpenter - see here, and then there's Design and Site. Plus Elfin Safety. Plus Fencing, Scaff, Electrical tags on everything except battery tools (ever wonder why battery stuff is now up in the 54 volt range - no tagging needed if you charge the batteries off of an inverter in the double-cab ute...).

Plus you lose time to Weather, Working Habits of employees (or lack of them), Sick and Annual Leave, and you lose money to Kiwisaver employer contribs, ACC, GST and provisional tax. See the attraction of the sole trader?

Whereas a Factory build has to be the way forward for all of this. Site requirements come down to a foundation and landscaping, erection consists of a crane hire and a few bolt-togetherers, each for 2-3 days if it's a halfway decent design. Check 'Grand Designs' for some clues if unsure. Or (gasp) the Irish

There is just no way the current paradigms can continue, and deliver the volumes and build quality needed.

Yes, expectations need to come down to achieve 'affordability':

Smaller spaces - nothing over say 140 squares

Hip or gable roofs with actual eaves to ensure weathertightness

Modular designs with maximal involvement from yacht and caravan designers to ensure space is used intelligently

Zero involvement with architects to ensure weathertightness and intelligent use of space

Multi-proof consented ex factory to ensure the stupid TLA's cannot introduce mucho time and therefore $ into the construction sequence

About the only two things Gubmint can do to speed this along is to grease the skids for the aforesaid factories and perhaps backstop the multi-proofing; and snooker the land-banker by doing a FIF-like tax on land value (deemed value is the key) plus maybe a coupla massive compulsory acquisitions at rural land cost, sold on at purchase price.

Thursday, June 22, 2017

The Interest article, as a sidebar, exposes an Interesting aspect of the housing market - the Welcome Home loans scheme.

This was implemented back in the glorious Helenista days - 2002-03 - as a 'solution' to the relative (even back then) inability of the battlers to get housing finance.

The unintended consequences (which, as most textbook cases do...) only emerged later.

Picking a figure at which to pitch the loan to the aforesaid battlers, took a regional price point. Of some derivation, obviously, but most likely a median/average/PDOOMA of recent sales.

This figure ($100K for Christchurch, around $350K for Awkland IIRC) ignored the fact that property could be had at very substantially less than that figure, particularly for battler purchase - small, run-down, 'needs TLC' etc.

So it served as an instant, universal oopards pricing signal for all sellers simultaneously, at that end of the market. After all, why sell that collapsing shack, for which one had privately estimated that a canny buyer would pay no more than $183K, at less than the Glorious WH loan figure plus a Modest Profit.

Which is exactly what happened. I've related my own case here - nice work if you can get it.

If we estimate the extent to which this new pricing floor conferred instant CG to tens of thousands of low-end houses, we could say an average increment of $100K, times say 30K homes in Awkland - that's $3 billion CG.

Now divide that CG thus conferred, by the number of WH loans ever advanced: say 10K.

It works out to $300K advanced via CG per WH loan.

It also explains the precipitate jump in the rate of increase in house prices thereafter, at least to some degree. Because the reaction to the re-pricing across the board was, oddly enough - 'hey, we cannot find a house for the current WH loan limit - better raise it'. E.g. here:

First home buyers can now borrow up to $350,000, up from the previous cap of $280,000.

Which, unsurprisingly - set off another round of universal price increases....which set off another WH loan limit increase which.....

The Welcome Home Loan was introduced in 2003. Between its inception and May 2009 a total of 4,482 Welcome Home Loans have been settled, translating into access to home finance of over $719 million.

The above works out to $160,420 advanced per loan. Compare this with my (quite possibly chimerical) figure of $300K given away in unearned CG via Universal Higher Price Floor, to all and sundry....

And even today, who, in their right Economic mind, would sell a house for less than the current WH loan limit? Because the essential qualification - 'can you fog a mirror' - is fairly straightforward.......

My contention is that this was easily the dopiest, most economically damaging policy, invented in recent times. Markets for houses are slick on the upside, sticky on the downside. They certainly don't need stoopid Gubmints incentivising mass upwards re-pricing....but that's exactly what happened.

Thursday, June 01, 2017

The graph of house affordability wonderfully clearly illustrates the way in which Ms Market end-runs stupid politicians.

The immediate cause of the 2002-3 jump in unaffordability was a choice by the newly elected Labour Gubmint to 'help' poor people into their homes. The Welcome Home scheme was a typical politician's gesture to cement its electability.

As the article suggests but does not pursue, if a guaranteed loan (criterion for issue - can ya Fog a Mirror?) of say $100K is plugged into a market where low-end prices are well below that, then what's a vendor gonna do?

That's right, folks, tack a '1' in front of what they were asking for the shack in question.

And once ya starts this boondoggle a'rollin', it gathers speed (higher prices), it affects most of all the exact constituency it purported to assist (the poor Labour voter) and the only way out of the mess is to raise the value of the loans on offer. Which promptly sets off another round of asking-price inflation.

After all, what vendor is not going to sell for the available guaranteed-loan value plus a Modest Margin?

The secondary cause of the price inflation was the familiar one thrashed about on these here august pages for a decade: the dreadful co-incidence of spatial planning (supply limits) and more regulation (Building Act, revised in 2004, Elfin Safety mania). The planning debacle conferred a Planning Gain to developable land (paid for by the buyer, who else) and the Regulation mania increased construction costs substantially. But that only affects new builds - the price explosion I am focussing on here is for existing older stock.

A personal example will suffice - I would invite an Auckland example (where the whole thing has exploded most spectacularly) to sit alongside my experience.

We bought a shack in 2001 for my son, just around the corner, in an eastern suburb of Christchurch, for $47K. Yes, Virginia, prices like that for 'needing TLC' properties were not uncommon. We straightened it up (it had a pronounced lean to the Left as viewed from the front - ironic, innit) tarted it up with paint, ply, grass and improved the stormwater drainage plus added a foundation to replace the rotted stumps that greeted us. All Like-for-Like, all done by my son and yours truly, a nice if small unit (around 70-80 squares, we never did measure it up) basically in our spare time.

We spend around the same amount - $40-odd K - to achieve of all this, so it owed us perhaps $85-90K.

Then, mirabile dictu, the Welcome Home scheme came along.

Overnight, it was impossible in the whole of Christchurch to buy anything that did not start with a '1'. Vendors treated the WH scheme as a universal pricing signal.

We cashed the little house in for $123K and split the proceeds 50/50. This proves the point about screwing up the low-end market by a naive and economically dopey funding scheme.

Only 18 months prior, a deserving young FHB could have gotten it at auction for $47K - it was quite livable as is provided one trod lightly over the missing-stumps bit.

That difference - $47 to $123K or 161% in original cost - is exactly what the stoopid politicians wrought by introducing a massive re-pricing incentive. And, of course, offset by the improved condition that we provided.

And the real pity is that as noted, the pricing structure this triggered off was universal, whereas the WH Loan applied only to a comparative few.

If one had the figures and divided the overall price adjustment NZ-wide by the number of WH beneficiaries all time to date, the figure would shock and horrify - it is most probably in the hundreds of millions or even low billions per such WHL recipient.

What would help buildings affordability (land prices aside, because they are a direct result of planning zoneration and strangulation over decades, following failed Brit-style planning fads) is a concerted effort to:

Establish factories for mass production of entire houses. Panelised, SIP etc. Little labour, mainly robots, CNC and lotsa clever software, all of which exists right now.

Isolate products of these factories from the incompetent hands of Councils by multi-proof consenting them at source. This leaves only founds and services to the inept ones.

Contract with these factories to produce social and affordable housing, so as to guarantee volumes - factories need certain volumes above the break-even point to have any future.

Crank it all up - the point of factories is fast, cheap, reliable quality, all done under cover. Great contrast with the current way of 'building' which has components clonked together by (wait for it) drug-addled hammer hands, out in the Awkland weather for weeks, and subject to the beady eyes of Inspectors who (rightly or wrongly) suspect that every single house is a Disaster in Waiting.

Thursday, November 17, 2016

The rail from Parnassus through to Kaikoura was the very last (because the toughest) main rail link to be completed. In 1940 ish (see http://www.railheritage.org.nz/Register/Listing.aspx?c=21&r=4&l=35 and http://www.newzealand.com/int/article/where-the-mountains-meet-the-sea/ ). There was the start of an alternative routing north out of Parnassus during the Depression and the embankments for the bridge over the Leader River are still there as evidence of that. There was also a rail branch to Waiau, but that vanished in the 60's/70's rationalisations although the line from Waipara to Waikari is still extant, used for heritage excursions. From Waikari to Waiau is easy country with one major river crossing (Hurunui) only.

But the talk of 'alternative routings' is fraught: the entire area from Waiau (inland) or Conway (coast) is riven with faults, has steep gullies (inland road SH70) plus even after the much-photographed and ooh'd-aah'd over coastal section north from Oaro, there is a long climb out of Oaro south through steep coastal cliffs, through a tunnel (Conway Bluff) then up the Conway to Parnassus. And as those faults run across the line of the coast and of any alternative route, no route can be thought of as 'safer'.

For my money, extensive rock shelters would proof the line against the inevitable slips and rockfalls: these are common after heavy rain in any case, let alone quake/fault events. And at least we know exactly where all the vulnerabilities are, now. Shelters would also preserve the views, which is a major drawcard for the whole area. They won't be cheap, though...

Friday, October 07, 2016

Sacrificed Landscapes – How the Energiewende Is Destroying our Landscapes. Book (in German, initially) soon to be published: author is Georg Etscheit.

In the book’s promotion video, a number of Germany’s leading environmental experts are seen denouncing Germany’s Energiewende, as they are aghast at what is going on.

Prof. Dr. Niko Paech, sustainability scientist, says:

"What’s awful about the destruction of the landscapes and the government is that all of it has a legitimization.”

and

"The German Energiewende has become a justification for destroying our last remaining natural landscapes.”

and

"Science is legitimizing a rampage against nature. We destroy the landscape while we claim it is serving the ecology. It’s a cannibalism by the measures. Climate protection is the aim that justifies the means to destroy all other remaining environmental media.”

Dr. Gerhard Gronauer, pastor:

Climate protection that uses technical means against nature is a contradiction in itself.”

“Greatest fraud project”

Jörg Rehmann, journalist and author:

"If we want to survive on this planet, we need an Energiewende. But what the policymakers have made of it is not an Energiewende, rather it is the greatest fraud project since the end of the second world war.”

and

"Serious science has long proven that the Energiewende cannot in any way reach its targets. Society has to bear billions in costs, already energy prices are exploding, and policymakers are driving us further into a nuthouse in the clouds.”

Monday, June 20, 2016

There's a win-win-win proposition possible. I've harped on aboot this for so many years that the words just write themselves. And there are of course, Trade-offs - this is a real-world deal after all.

First things first:

Gubmint is best at setting overall parameters, and a small amount of pump priming So the single overall parameter of note is multi-proof consented house designs, and the pump priming is getting one or more housing factories manufacturing those designs, at volume.

Multi-proofing the designs side-lines the stupid TLA's and their interminable and expensive consenting processes.

Getting a few House Factories up and running means some development incentives, and some volume: the former possible via e.g. tax or depreciation breaks, the latter via letting social-housing contracts for hundreds of houses to achieve short break-even times for aforesaid factories.

My personal favourite: staff these factories with re-trained and now unemployable TLA consenting wallahs. Instant productivity increase, This is, of course, not a compulsory feature. But oooh, wouldn't it be nice (to mis-use a Beach Boys lyric...)

Finance all of this via a combination of Stamp Duty, CGT and swingeing differential rates on buildable but bare land - could even be relatively small net cost compared to the increase in social utility via warm, snug (of which more later) and cheap houses.

Ah, those trade-offs:

Accept that small, highly modular designs are all there is. Small = less cost, modular = able to be cranked out by automated machinery in factories.

'All there is' means abandon architects, consultants and the plethora of ticket-clippers who infest the building industry as currently constituted. If any of these types find themselves unemployed, into the Factories with 'em...

Alter district plans top-down, by building into the NPS the requirement that houses produced this way override district plans, NIMBY's and BANANA's and the production thereof would constitute Compliance with the NPS. This accords with the rising realisation that Awkland could well sink the rest of us if left in the bumbling hands of ACC i.e. it's an issue of national significance

The target would be not less than 15-20,000 such houses per annum, over the next five years. As Christchurch demonstrates in spades, flooding the market with lotsa land and building lotsa houses (and, BTW, doing it the old-fashioned way, with occasionally drug-tested hammer-hands clonking frames together out in the weather) has screwed house prices to affordable (barely) levels through the Magic of Markets. Doubters can consulthttp://mikegreerhomes.co.nz/home-and-land/search/ and try Faringdon: house plus land start at $419K.

I've no doubt that this is doable. It just takes the will (and the cojones and vertebrae amongst politicians of all stripes). Aye, there's the rub........(Awkland Unitary Plan pun included for your delectation)....